The Dyslexia Foundation would like to take a moment to thank everyone who made this conference possible. Our January 22nd, 2016 conference “Dyslexia and Literacy in High-Risk and Diverse Populations” was an excellent opportunity for researchers and practitioners to share what they’ve learned with our larger community.

The conference was held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at the University of California San Francisco.

About our Speakers

Moderator: Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhDFumiko Hoeft MD PhD is Associate Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Dyslexia Center, Director of the UCSF Hoeft Laboratory for Educational Neuroscience (brainLENS.org), and Scientific Advisor of the Bay Area Discovery Museum’s Center for Childhood Creativity (BADM’s CCC). She received research training at Harvard, UCLA, Caltech and Stanford. Dr. Hoeft’s current research program focuses on brain development, and brain mechanisms underlying skill acquisition such as language and reading, and educationally relevant concepts such as motivation, mindset, grit and stereotype threat. (http://profiles.ucsf.edu/fumiko.hoeft)

Albert Galaburda, MD: A World Perspective in Dyslexia A native of Chile, he received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Boston University, and trained in Medicine under Norman Levinsky and in Neurology under Norman Geschwind, both at the Boston City Hospital (currently the Boston Medical Center). He received board certification in Internal Medicine in 1976 and in Neurology in 1977. Dr. Galaburda is the Emily Fisher-Landau Professor of Neurology (Neuroscience) at Harvard Medical School. His clinical and research expertise is in the field of cognitive neurology, with a special focus on learning and attention disorders, as they affect adults. – See more at: http://www.bidmc.org/CentersandDepartments/Departments/Neurology/CognitiveNeurology/MeetOurTeam.aspx#sthash.MExXgi5T.dpuf

Julie Washington, PhD: Issues in Literacy Among Low Socio-Economic Status PopulationsJulie A. Washington is a professor and the program director in Communication Sciences and Disorders. In addition, Washington is an affiliate faculty of the Research on the Challenges of Acquiring Language and Literacy initiative and the Urban Child Study Center at Georgia State. Her work focuses on understanding cultural dialect use in African American children with a specific emphasis on the impact of dialect on language assessment, literacy attainment and academic performance. Her work with preschoolers has focused on understanding and improving the emergent literacy skills necessary to support later reading proficiency in high-risk groups, with a special focus on the needs of children growing up in poverty in urban contexts. Currently, Washington is a principal investigator on the Georgia Language Disabilities Research Innovation Hub, funded by the National Institutes of Health – Eunice Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development. This research hub is focused on improving early identification of reading disabilities in elementary school aged African American children, and includes a focus on children, their families, teachers and communities. (http://education.gsu.edu/profile/julie-washington/)

Emily Galloway: Intervention Research and ApplicationEmily Galloway doctoral research explores the language skills that support successful school-relevant reading and writing in populations of linguistically and socioeconomically diverse students in grades 4-8. She is also an instructor in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaching courses on the topic of linguistic diversity and writing development. (http://scholar.harvard.edu/epgalloway/biocv)

Dr. Joan Mele-McCarthy: Closing RemarksDr. Joan A. Mele-McCarthy, CCC-SLP, has been elected to the Board of Directors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) as the Vice President for Government Relations and Public Policy and will serve a three-year term. ASHA is the national professional, scientific, and credentialing association for more than 173,070 audiologists, speech-language pathologists, speech, language, and hearing scientists, audiology and speech-language pathology support personnel, and students. (http://thesummitschool.org/dr-joan-mele-mccarthy-elected-to-the-asha-board-of-directors/)

For more information, please contact the Foundation at dyslexiafoundation@gmail.com. For sponsorship opportunities at future conferences, please contact Will Baker at 941-807-0499.

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